Healing Our World: Weekly Comment

By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

Arctic Pollution – An Unexpected Consequence

Hold on to what is good
even if it is
a handful of earth.
Hold on to what you believe
even if it is
a tree which stands by itself.
Hold on to what you must do
even if it is
a long way from here.
Hold on to life even when
it is easier letting go.
Hold on to my hand even when
I have gone away from you.
-- Nancy Wood

Most of us have heard about environmental pollutants entering our bodies, and it is becoming almost common knowledge that we all have some level of toxic substances in our blood, just from breathing the air.

But what group of people would you think fit this description: 200 hazardous compounds in their bodies causing birth defects, lowered intelligence, and myriads of health problems; PCB and mercury levels far exceeding international health guidelines; babies who suffer high rates of infections, reduced intelligence, and poor memory skills; mothers with seven times more PCBs in their breast milk than others?

You might be inclined to answer that these must be people who live adjacent to a chemical plant along the Mississippi River or families who live next to farms with heavy pesticide use. You would be wrong in both cases.

The people who are suffering from the waste products of a consumer culture gone wild live in the last place you would expect such pollution to reach – the North Pole.

In Greenland, where the Arctic Ocean meets the North Atlantic, a 4,000 year old society lives, part of an Arctic population estimated to top 650,000. About 90,000 Inuit live in Eastern Canada and Greenland, a territory of Denmark under its own home rule government. Other such indigenous people live spread across eight nations, speaking dozens of languages.

And they are dying.

Greenland has been occupied for at least 5,000 years, but now the residents and the ecosystems around them are under stress. (Photo courtesy Greenland Guide)

The contaminants have an easy pathway up the food chain into human bodies. First, microscopic zooplankton consume the chemicals. Zooplankton eat their own weight in 2.2 days. Phytoplankton eat the zooplankton, eating 10 times their own weight in 2.2 days. Tiny crustaceans known as copepods eat millions of phytoplankton, small fish eat scores of copepods, big fish eat the small fish, and so on.

The marine mammals and people who eat those fish are consuming a large amount of toxic substances from this process, known as bioaccumulation.

The Arctic inhabitants’ main diet is almost exclusively marine mammals and has been for thousands of years. Urban dwellers, although they live in closer proximity to pollution, consume mostly land based foods and no marine mammals or other predators near the top of the food chain. Ironically, the “natural” food of the Arctic turns out to be the carrier for the industrialized waste of an entire planet.

Umbilical cord blood in the newborns of remote Greenland villages and the breast milk of their mothers have PCB and mercury levels 20 to 50 times higher than levels found in urban areas of the United States and Europe. This was reported in 2003 by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, an international organization established in 1991 to implement components of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy.

The flame retardant chemical PBDE, used worldwide in everything from furniture to infant pajamas, is found in Inuit blood. The United States is the major source for that chemical, while the mercury that is contaminating the Arctic peoples comes mostly from the burning of coal in power plants, most of which are in Asia.

Greenland is in the direct path of winds from North America and Europe, getting the world’s largest dose of airborne contaminants.

Indigenous people in the Arctic are the most affected by contamination of their traditional food sources such as caribou, seal, and fish. (Photo courtesy Environmental Health Perspectives)

The Inuit claim that they are only able to survive in their cold, hostile environment because of the food they eat, which, they say, warms them from within. The large amount of Omega-3 fatty acids they consume as a result of their diet has resulted in heart disease and diabetes being virtually unknown among the Inuit who eat traditional foods. Those who have switched to eating more and more imported processed foods are showing signs of increased heart disease.

In the 25 years I have studied and written about environmental issues, none has saddened me more than the human disaster taking place in the Arctic. Society’s disconnection from the natural world, the cycles of life, and the rhythms of nature are nowhere as evident. Our daily denial of the profound impact that our reliance on economic systems has on every human and animal on Earth will be the undoing of us all.

If we lack motivation to change our consumption patterns and demand that industry clean up its act to help ourselves, then we should do it for the people of the Arctic - people who take no part in our industrialized world.

How can we tolerate creating a situation where the bodies of the Greenland Inuit contain the highest level of industrial contamination on planet Earth? How can we tolerate the fact that the breast milk of these people would be classified as hazardous waste?

I don’t know anymore what it will take to change the insidious destruction of our world. Education, awareness, guilt, all factors that you would expect might change things, seem to have little or no effect on the average consumption-intoxicated citizen of a developed country.

So what do we do? Maybe we can first choose to agree that what is happening to the Inuit is wrong. It won’t save them, but it is a start.

RESOURCES

1. Read about the details of the contamination of the Arctic peoples at: http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/NewScience/ubiquitous/2000courtneyetal.htm#

2. See a perspective on the issue from the United Nations Environment Programme at: http://www.chem.unep.ch/pops/POPs_Inc/press_releases/ottawa-1.htm

3. The Environmental Defense Fund is creating the “The Arctic at Risk: A Circumpolar Atlas of Environmental Concerns.” See a draft at: http://rainbow.ldgo.columbia.edu/edf/

4. Get help in overcoming consumerism at: http://www.verdant.net/

5. The Center for a New American Dream will help you redefine what it means to be happy and secure at: http://www.newdream.org/

6. Keep an eye on business and industry with the help of Corporate Watch at: http://www.corpwatch.org/

7. Find out who your Congressional representatives are and e-mail them. Tell them you don’t want them to make decisions based on making a few people rich at the expense of millions. If you know your Zip code, you can find them at: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ziptoit.html

8. Visit Peace Brigades International and learn how some people are changing their lives and the world at: http://www.peacebrigades.org/index.html

9. Stay informed with the help of the Alternative Press Index at: http://www.altpress.org

{Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and teacher in Seattle and the author of "Healing Our World", A Journey from the Darkness Into the Light," available at: http://www.xlibris.com/HealingOurWorld.html or your local bookstore. His new book of photographs and thoughts on interconnectedness, “Of This Earth, Reflections on Connections,” is now available. Learn about it at: http://ofthisearth.org. Please send your thoughts, comments, and visions to him at: jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his website at: http://www.healingourworld.com}